Download PDF | Mykola Melnyk - Byzantium and the Pechenegs_ The Historiography of the Problem-Brill Academic Pub (2022).
410 Pages
Acknowledgements
This book is an outcome of my interest in the history of non-historic peoples – peoples that no longer exist. The ever-growing demand for grain in Europe, advances in firearms and artillery, and improvement of the heavy plow for the cultivation of steppe soils left the nomadic peoples of the lands north of the Black Sea with no chance to survive. Having dissolved among the plowmen, the steppe peoples were deprived of their history. I hope that my work, among many others, will help to right this injustice. This study would not have been possible without the luminous academic environment of Lviv, with its towering figure of the late Prof. Yaroslav Dashkevych, whose ideas have influenced me greatly.
Despite all the political vicissitudes of the 20th century, he ensured the continuity of the tradition of historical scholarship in the city. I would like to express my great appreciation to Prof. Florin Curta for his enthusiastic encouragement of my research. I owe special thanks to my colleagues and friends Dr. Vasyl′ Kmet′ (Director of the Academic Library at the Ivan Franko National University of Lviv) and Dr. Darius Baronas (Lithuanian Institute of History), who helped me with access to scholarly materials. My thanks are extended to the staff of the Academic Library at the Ivan Franko National University of Lviv, the Library of the Ukrainian Catholic University, the Vernadsky National Library of Ukraine, and the University of Warsaw Library. Their assistance is greatly appreciated. I also want to thank Yaroslav Prykhodko for his painstaking work in translating the manuscript into English, which, given my writing style, must have been a challenge. I am grateful to the entire team at Brill for their kind support and patience. Finally, I would like to thank my wife Mariya Ivanchak, MA in History, for her professional criticism and linguistic insights.
Introduction
By the time Vasiliĭ Vasilievskiĭ published his study “Byzantium and the Pechenegs (1048-1094)” in 1872,1 a scattering of place names was all that was left of the Pechenegs and Torks-Uzes of Central, Eastern, and Southeastern Europe. István Varró, a member of the Jász-Cuman mission to the empress of Austria Maria Theresa2 and the known last speaker of the Cuman language (at least he knew the Pater Noster in Cuman), died in 1770.
The British traveler Aubrey Herbert,3 on his way from Sarajevo to Constantinople via the sanjak of Novi Pazar, witnessed a collapse of central authority and a ubiquitous presence of ethnic-based bands of outlaws. In a diary entry from 25 August 1912, he called them “descendants of the Patzinaks who bothered the Crusaders so much.”4 Of course, this was less an ethnographic observation than an echo of Herbert’s first-rate education in history, showing his familiarity with reports by the chroniclers of the First Crusade, Peter Tudebode or Albert of Aachen, on the crusaders’ progress through the Balkans. Nonetheless, Herbert’s words are a testimony to the deep mark left by the Pechenegs, Uzes, and Cumans in the history of the Balkan-Danubian region and Europe as a whole. After making their first appearance north of the Black Sea in the 9th century, the Pechenegs quickly became a decisive factor in the history of Eastern and Southeastern Europe. They greatly contributed to the demise of the Khazar Khaganate and caused the relocation of the Magyars to Pannonia and thus, indirectly, the formation of the Hungarian state; their activities were also one of the principal, albeit often neglected, triggers in the rise of the Rus′ state.
With the demise of early medieval Bulgaria and restoration of Constantinople’s rule in the northern Balkans shortly before the year 1000, the Pechenegs became Byzantium’s neighbors. Beginning in the second quarter of the 11thcentury, the empire was the main target of their raids. Incursions of the Pechenegs, Uzes, and Cumans, their participation in anti-Byzantine coalitions on the side of either the Hungarians or the Seljuks, their involvement in local rebellions in the northern Balkans, and conflicts in their own midst all had a considerable impact on Byzantium. Meanwhile, emperors recruited nomads as border guards, as well as soldiers for wars in Anatolia and the Balkans. There are good reasons to believe that during the second half of the 11th century a Pecheneg political entity emerged, known in the sources as Πατζινακία.
Despite the disappearance of that polity shortly before 1100, and the subsequent stabilization of Byzantine power on the Lower Danube under Alexios I Komnenos, waves of nomadic attacks continued well into the 12th century. The migration of the Cumans into the Danubian region, which began in the last third of the 11th century, was one of the critical factors contributing to Byzantium’s loss of a large part of its European possessions towards the end of the following century as a consequence of the rebellion of the Assenids and the rise of the so-called Second Bulgarian Empire.
Equally significant is the cultural dimension of the confrontation between the nomads and Constantinople in the 10th and 11th centuries. Greek sources report several attempts to baptize the Pechenegs; there are references to their becoming familiar with Islam while in the Balkans. Archaeological materials point to a process of gradual social change and sedentarization among the nomads in the region. Even though a lot of work has been done on the subject of relations between Byzantium and the nomads of the North Pontic steppes in the 10th and 11th centuries, there is no general historiographical overview of the entire body of research on this problem. Existing historiographical treatments focus on narrow, chronologically and/or thematically specific questions.
In Volume One of his Byzantinoturcica (1942), Gyula Moravcsik offered a first bibliographic survey of the accomplishments of Byzantine and Oriental studies around the world.5 However, the Hungarian scholar did not go into much detail on historiography. Neither have the authors of subsequent important monographic studies in this field, such as Petre Diaconu,6 Vasilka Tăpkova-Zaimova,7 Paul Stephenson,8 Igor′ Knyazkiǐ,9 Victor Spinei,10 Alexandru Madgearu,11 and Marek Meško.12 All these scholars apply the historiographical perspective only to individual issues. Some authors limit themselves to bibliographies, often quite selective.13 A similar approach may be observed in commentaries to sources published in translation.14 In the introduction to his book on Byzantium’s Balkan frontier, Paul Stephenson briefly describes the problem of the frontier in historiography,15 outlines the changing trends in the study of Byzantine history of the 10th and 11th centuries in the Western scholarship of the second half of the 20th century,16 and shows the importance of archaeology and numismatics for Byzantine studies.17
He does not, however, consider the major works that deal with the specific issue addressed in his monograph, namely relations between Byzantium and the nomads from across the Danube. Alexandru Madgearu’s book includes a small overview of the historiography since 1946, the year when Nicolae Bănescu published his Duchés byzantins du Paristrion (Paradounavon) et de Bulgarie. Madgearu also briefly lists the key works and archaeological studies of the second half of the 20th and early 21st centuries.18 Florin Curta emphasizes the importance of archaeological data for any discussion regarding the history of medieval Southeastern Europe.19 Purely historiographical works pertaining to the subject of this book do exist. For example, Ruslana Mavrodina’s Kyivan Rus′ and Nomads20 traces a paradigm shift in the study of nomads in Russian and Soviet historiography from the 18th century to the 1970s. However, Mavrodina does not consider the international context and makes no mention of foreign influences on Russian and Soviet scholars.
Peter Golden has published an overview of studies, including archaeological, in the history of the Khazar Khaganate and the steppe peoples.21 The Bulgarian Orientalist Valeri Stoyanov, analyses the achievements of global historiography in the study of the Cumans.22 Мikhail V. Bibikov offers a survey of the historiography of Byzantine sources relating to the history of the North Pontic steppes and the Caucasus.23 His book was the first to cover an extended timespan – from the appearance of Byzantine texts in Rus′ to their revision in the 1970s. However, the most recent work quoted by Bibikov came out in 1980, even though Byzantine studies and related disciplines made significant progress in the following decades. Inasmuch as Bibikov’s monograph focuses on written sources, it omits the achievements of archaeologists and Orientalists in the study of Byzantine-nomadic relations. The present work is therefore the first attempt to treat the problem as a whole from the historiographical point of view, ranging over almost 150 years since Vasiliĭ Vasilievskiĭ’s “Byzantium and the Pechenegs” and across a wide gamut of studies of written, archaeological, numismatic, and sigillographic sources, as well as linguistic scholarship.
The book tackles the research output of the principal centers of Byzantine studies and the national historiographies of the countries of Central, Eastern and Southeastern Europe. Geographically, it covers a territory from the Taman Peninsula to Belgrade; chronologically – the period from the late 9th century to the year 1122 (from the appearance of the Pechenegs in the northern Black Sea steppes to the Battle of Beroia). Therefore, it will focus primarily on the historiography of the history of the Pechenegs and Uzes in the Balkans. The zenith of the Cumans in this region came somewhat later, in the 12th and 13th centuries, and the “Cuman” historiography, thanks to the efforts of Valeri Stoyanov, is much better studied.
This book’s objectives are: to trace the formation and evolution of the field in question in the context of global historiography; to analyse changes triggered by newly-discovered sources and transformations in methodological frameworks; to identify possible connections between national historiographical paradigms and the study of relations between the Byzantine Empire and neighboring nomads; to show how the study of the subject has responded to seminal advances in Byzantine studies; and to outline the state of knowledge on the subject and prospects for further research. The book is designed to work on two levels.
The first level is purely “factual,” in that it deals with what we know about Byzantine-nomadic relations in terms of names, dates, locations, idiom, the nature and course of events, and their probable causes, consequences, and place in regional and global history. Because very little is actually known with certainty about many episodes in relations between Byzantium and the Pechenegs, there has been a great deal of academic discussion around such “facts” as dates and locations of events and their participants, and even around the possibility that some events the descriptions or reports of which have come down to us may have been the fruit of authorial imagination.
The “factual” level of the book is therefore intended to show how source criticism, the discovery of burial sites, pottery, coins and seals, and even astronomical observation have advanced our understanding of the history of the region. The other level of analysis is “ideological,” conceptual. On this level, I attempt to show how interpretation of events has evolved within the framework of the historiography of Byzantine-nomadic relations and to what extent it has been affected by state ideologies, including nationalism, Marxism, or Eurasianism, and by latent or open territorial disputes between countries.
Although at first glance the subject of this work is far removed from politics, its study has reflected every dominant trend in the national historiographies of Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary, the Soviet Union, and a number of other countries. The book demonstrates not only the close ideological connection between the events of the 19th and 20th centuries and the study of nomads but also the fact that politicians have often given direct orders to historians to re-write history. It is questionable whether it has been any historian’s intention to look specifically for nomads. The earliest beginnings of the study of relations between Byzantium and the nomads of the North Pontic steppes coincided with the rise of Byzantine studies as an academic discipline.
To describe the phases in the development of this historiographic tradition, I employ the concepts of paradigm and paradigm shift, borrowed from the work of the American historian and philosopher of science Thomas S. Kuhn (1922–96), especially from his Structure of Scientific Revolutions. I also draw on the theory of discourse and discursive practices. Both components of the subject the historiography of which I consider (Byzantium and the nomads) constitute entities (the imperium and medieval nations) that have long disappeared from the political and ethnic reality and cannot represent themselves in the manner in which, for example, a French historian can write about the history of France, or an ethnologist from Bilbao – about the past of the Basques.24 The history of Byzantium’s relations with the Pechenegs, Uzes, and Cumans has been studied predominantly by “Western” scholars.
It is thus an instance of Orientalism, both as a study of the “East” by the “West” and as an episode in the specifically “Orientalist” discourse in the sense given to the term by Edward Said. This book will appeal to all who are interested in medieval studies in general and the history of Southeastern Europe, the history of Byzantium and neighbouring medieval states, and the history of the Turkic peoples, as well as historiography and the history of scholarship in the 19th to 21st centuries.
Link
Press Here
0 التعليقات :
إرسال تعليق